Brian Behlendorf: "I agree we can work with Microsoft, but sometimes they put terms on the relationships that just make that impossible. I was glad I was able to get Mundie to state 'of course!' when I asked if they had patents they planned to enforce against independent implementors of .Net and Hailstorm. It's amazing how perfectly they craft their offering such that those who raise the more serious issues about them came off sounding like paranoid lunatics, and when the predictions of those 'lunatics' come true (as in, 'MS will use their monopoly on the desktop to create a new monopoly on the Internet') people will just write it off with a 'who could have known? they probably earned it anyways' set of comments. While that debate on Thursday's panel (if you saw it, if not, there's video on technetcast.ddj.com) made MS come out looking more reasonable than the open source folks, I think people are even more aware now of some of the deep issues their proposed new architectures present."

Guy Kawasaki: "Investors are looking for four qualities: hard-core science and technology; a strong core of a management team with experience; identifiable potential customers with money; and a believable business model. In the past, if you were missing some of these qualities, you could still get funded. Now, you have to have just about everyone of them."

Heartfelt condolences to O'Reilly Associates who lost one of their best to a heart attack.

Today's song: "Then one night in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, I chanced to meet a bartender who said he knew her well. And as he handed me a drink he began to hum a song. And all the boys there, at the bar, began to sign along."

Look at how Ballmer phrases it as a question. He doesn't say there isn't a plot, he just says that people are asking if there is one. (And he kind of mocks them.) That's straight out of the Microsoft double-talk playbook. Try turning the question around. "OK Steve, I'll bite, is there a big plot here?" If so, oooh.

News.Com: "Amazon.com is quietly scaling back its once high-profile online auction business."

Standard: "Curl just might revolutionize the way Web sites are made. Who thinks so? Tim Berners-Lee."

Confusing BigCo juju

ComputerWorld: UDDI Floundering. "Kurt and Munter said they expect thousands, if not millions, of companies to be registered in the directory by this time next year."

Either the BigCo's don't want SOAP to gain traction, or they have no clue how to develop a community around a new platform. They throw confusing juju all around, they confuse themselves and each other, leaving random developers to say "Let us know when you figure it out."

In fact, SOAP is ready today. There are 68 implementations covering most scripting environments, operating systems, source code philosophies. There's an easy path through the confusing maze of specs. Just build distributed applications, and be proud to be on the leading edge. We're three years into a 20-year-endeavor, just like Unix or Mac, or Windows. A new sub-platform of the Internet. Use your imagination. That's what matters.